Books: Top Ten Hostess Gift Books

With weekends in the country in mind, Megan O’Grady rounds up the books most likely to please your hostess, whatever her taste. For the fervent fashionphile:Karl Lagerfeld and Douglas Kirkland’s Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel/Summer ’62 (Steidl) offers a portrait in vintage photos of the woman behind the icon—leaving her suite at the Ritz Hotel; watching a défilé from the famous mirrored staircase. For home cooks and aspiring alchemists: Whether you’re craving Mussels Saganaki or Phoenician Honey Cookies, Vefa Alexiadou’s Vefa’s Kitchen (Phaidon) presents a rapturous tour of Greece’s elemental, sun-infused cuisine, while Deirdre Heekin’s Libation: A Bitter Alchemy (Chelsea Green) provides a glimpse into the Osteria Pane e Salute co-proprietor’s spirited education, from the pursuit of a rare Florentine liqueur to growing grapes on her Vermont farm. For the intellectual sybarite:Rachel Cusk’s The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy (FSG) follows the wry English novelist as she savors both Michelangelo and the anxiety-inducing “artist’s palette” of flavors to choose from at the gelateria: “What human mood is ever so monochromatic, so pure?” For art aficionados: Reprinted for the first time since the 1980s, Henri Matisse’s Jazz (Prestel) is a joyous riff on color and abstraction through the artist’s late-career paper cutouts, while Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray’s John Singer Sargent: Venetian Figures and Landscapes 1898–1913 (Yale University Press) is a sumptuous collection of watercolors and oils capturing the city of canals. For the music-minded: Edited by Peter Terzian,Heavy Rotation: Twenty Writers on the Albums That Changed Their Lives (Harper Perennial) has authors ranging from Cólm Toibín (Joni Mitchell) to Ben Kunkel (The Smiths) confess their aural inspiration. For weekend readers: With fetching, candy-colored covers, the new Harper Perennial Classic Collections—Willa Cather’s The Bohemian Girl, Stephen Crane’s An Experiment in Misery,Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s A Disgraceful Affair, Herman Melville’s The Happy Failure,Leo Tolstoy’s Family Happiness, Oscar Wilde’s The Model Millionaire—are bright additions to any bedside table. &nbsp; For the nostalgic gardener:Helena Attlee and Charles Latham’s Italian Gardens: Romantic Splendor in the Edwardian Age (Monacelli) collects Latham’s jaw-droppingly lush photographs of the golden age of Italian gardens, from the frescoed loggia of the Villa Medici in Fiesole to the citrus trees of the Boboli Gardens. For the suspense-loving cineaste: From the author of the novel on which Slumdog Millionaire was based, Vikas Swarup’s Six Suspects (Minotaur Books), a delightfully zany, Bollywood-style whodunit, is the screwball thriller of the season.